How Lily Gladstone Humanizes True Crime in 'Under the Bridge'

Just as Killers of the Flower Moon was about to make its highly anticipated debut at 2023’s Cannes Film Festival, Lily Gladstone was putting the finishing touches on a spiritual companion known as Under the Bridge.

Through Martin Scorsese’s historical tragedy, Gladstone earned a Golden Globe win and Oscar nomination for her role as Molly Burkhart (née Kyle), one of the many victims and few survivors of the Osage murders in the early 20th century. A year after wrapping Killers, Quinn Shephard’s Hulu miniseries — based on Rebecca Godfrey’s nonfiction book Under the Bridge — cast Gladstone in her now-Emmy-nominated role of Officer Cam Bentland, who seeks justice for the 1997 murder of Indo-Canadian teenager Reena Virk. 

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Gladstone fully admits that she felt some reluctance about telling consecutive true-crime stories at opposite ends of the century, but after Shephard and showrunner Samir Mehta’s compelling pitch, she couldn’t resist a particular trait that Under the Bridge shared with Killers: “They were both very centered on humanizing the victims, and I think that’s something that you kind of miss when you base a film [or series] on a true crime,” Gladstone said during a recent THR Presents panel, powered by Vision Media. “When you do so, it opens up this difficult but necessary opportunity to have some really important conversations about societal inequities and certain injustices that make some people easier to victimize than others.”

Gladstone’s character is a composite of multiple real-life figures who were tied to the Virk case, and with Cam Bentland being an Indigenous woman who was adopted into a white law enforcement family, it allowed the storytellers to create a kinship between her and Reena (Vritika Gupta) as outsiders in Saanich, British Columbia. Production took place just a few hours away in Vancouver, but there were plenty of resources available to inform her fictional character, including co-star Daniel Diemer, who’s from a village in Central Saanich and played Cam’s brother Scott. “I believe his best friend’s father was a Saanich police officer during that time, so it was nice that Daniel had an immediate, very close relationship that we could always fold into the conversation about law enforcement during this time,” Gladstone shared. “We didn’t have to look far for people that either lived through it or know it so much.”

Competing for best supporting actress in a limited or anthology series or movie, Gladstone submitted the finale episode, “Mercy Alone,” in which Cam discovers the true nature of her adoption. She was a part of Canada’s “Sixties Scoop,” which ripped 20,000 Indigenous children away from their birth families or communities so that white families could adopt them by way of the foster system. Upon the conclusion of the Reena Virk case, Cam subsequently quit her job as a police officer, telling her adoptive father (Matt Craven), “I look like the people who took me away.” She proceeds to find her birth family who were only “a ferry ride away” from her the entire time.

Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, is quite familiar with the history of this immoral act across Canada and the States, beginning in the late ‘50s and ending in the early ‘80s. She still consulted with Sixties Scoop survivor Steve DeRoy, the father of Isabel DeRoy-Olson, who Gladstone helped cast in the role of Young Cam Bentland after working together on Fancy Dance. “Steve definitely provided some beautiful insights that helped with having a strong relationship with your adoptive family and some of the reconciliation you need to do within yourself and wanting to find your birth family,” Gladstone shared.

The series ends on the real-life question of whether justice for Reena Virk was actually served, but it also makes its most profound point that forgiveness is never out of reach if meaningful steps are taken. The two principal killers in the case both illustrated what happens when accountability is accepted versus not accepted, but the overall question is still very much up for debate. “It is a bigger and more difficult conversation to talk about if justice was served, because, ultimately, in the end, Reena should have celebrated her 41st birthday this year and she didn’t,” Gladstone said. “So nothing can correct that, nothing can bring her back.”

This edition of THR Presents is brought to you by Hulu.

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